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Josh Marshall tweeted a screengrab last night from the New York Times, saying, “This arrangement and editorial gloss may stand for, capture the journalism about the entire campaign.”
And we were like nooooooo. That’s too on-the-nose! Those two stories, literally side-by-side? One headline, “In Interviews, Kamala Harris Continues to Bob and Weave,” and the second, “In remarks about migrants, Donald Trump invoked his long-held fascination with genes and genetics”? Noooooooo.
That would be like if we were making fun of the New York Times and we made a mean joke and said if they were covering the Holocaust with their current staff, they’d send a team of reporters to diners around Auschwitz to get MAGA Germans’ opinion on “What’s That Smell?”
So we went to the website for ourselves, and there it was on the front page in the 2024 election section.
Motherfucker.
Yeah, we reckon that’s it right there, just as Marshall said.
In a campaign where the word “sanewashing” has become shorthand for describing head-up-their-ass media jerking us off down the road to fascism, literally grading one candidate — the Nazi candidate — on a curve because they can’t bear to report on him as he is, while that same media nitpicks and bitches about everything the other candidate — an accomplished Black woman who believes in preserving the country’s democracy — does, yeah, we reckon the history books ought to go ahead and preserve those screengrabs for when they tell the story of the 2024 election.
If you read the two stories linked, you don’t find much of redeeming value. If you click on the Trump one, the headline currently says, “Trump’s Remarks on Migrants Illustrate His Obsession With Genes,” which is slightly better, we guess, in that it doesn’t quite so much evoke images of a third-grader who just loves the science fair as the wording on the front page does.
We guess it sort of alludes to the idea that we might be dealing with some Nazi-ass eugenics shit. Of course it takes the Times quite a while to get there in the body of the piece. If only there were a way to more accurately tell the reader what the story is really about from the get-go. Some way to let the reader know this is an article about Donald Trump saying migrants murder people because of their genetics, who calls immigrants “animals” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Ahem.
As for the article about Harris, the big reveal is that she’s a politician who sometimes answers the question she wants to answer, as opposed to the specific question asked. This puts her in the company of literally every politician who ever lived, but the New York Times acts as if it’s uncovered something unnaturally shifty about her.
There goes Kamala Harris, bobbing and weaving!
It’s an article that pays lip service to acknowledging that it’s hard to even compare Harris’s answering questions like a typical politician sometimes, vs. a candidate who babbles out lies faster than stenographers can record them.
And yet:
A trained prosecutor, Ms. Harris is lawyerly, argumentative and fundamentally defensive. She often deflects or sidesteps. She can speak passionately about her values in a way that leaves listeners feeling as if the question had been acknowledged, even if the substance remained unaddressed. To avoid delineating her stance on some issues, she will instead focus on her dedication to progress and inclusion.
Her verbal acrobatics may be contributing to the impression that some voters have that they do not know her or her policy views very well.
Oh fuck you.
Also, what is Trump’s own self-styled term for his rhetorical style of babbling like a braindead windsock for hours on end about sharks, batteries, Hannibal Lecter, and immigrants poisoning the blood of America, featuring more paraphrases of “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” than anyone has ever heard at an American political rally?
What does he call that, as he compliments his own brilliance?
He calls it “the weave.” The New York Times should know that because they’ve written about it.
We don’t know what kind of malignant sickness is metastasizing throughout the political newsroom at the Times. And we don’t know what’s going to happen on November 5.
But if Kamala Harris loses, the New York Times’s absolute failure to meet the historical moment — not just this year, but ever since 2015 — will be a big part of the story of how the United States of America ended up where it ended up.
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